“Why do they tell us to go to the aid sites, why? And when we go there, we get killed. What they’re doing to us is wrong, they’re lying to us.” In three short phrases, Arafat Essaim – whose younger brother was killed by Israeli gunfire on Sunday – summed up the murderous chaos into which humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza have descended.
Since then, distressing scenes of desperate and hungry Palestinian civilians jostling for aid and running from gunfire have been repeated several times. Dozens of people are reported to have been killed or injured by Israeli forces. This pandemonium is not the result of a well-meaning aid effort that is trying but failing – it is the consequence of the destruction and exclusion of the humanitarian networks that supported Gaza’s people before the war.
UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, is an organisation that developed considerable expertise owing to its work with generations of displaced Palestinian communities. Since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, the agency has literally and metaphorically been in Israel’s firing line, losing more than 300 team members in the war and facing criminalisation inside Israel itself. Many other international aid agencies, as well as most journalists, have been shut out of Gaza and prevented from doing their jobs.
Following May’s lifting by Israel of its 11-week aid blockade, the resulting vacuum was filled by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US and Israeli-backed relief provider created on the fly. Some good-faith observers argued, with reservations, that this body be given a chance to work because of the sheer level of starvation stalking Gaza. A week of disorder and death at aid sites has made it clear that the GHF model – that is, privitised and militarised relief work during a full-blown war – had failure hardwired into it.
Fatally flawed strategies, such as gathering huge numbers of hungry people at a single aid distribution point, have proved disastrous. The menacing presence of unidentified private soldiers and Israel’s labelling of roads to the aid sites as “combat zones” have only exacerbated the aid crisis. There is a reason why many humanitarian professionals are heavily trained and often stay in the same field for years to get the right experience and skills – relief work is an incredibly difficult, complex job. The ad-hoc aid effort taking place in Gaza is doing more harm than good. The American consulting company, Boston Consulting Group, has now pulled out of the GHF's work. However, the GHF continues to insist that the aid delivery is a conducted in an orderly way and denies reports of killings.
Israel’s political and military leadership may feel their deny-and-deflect approach to reports about civilians being shot dead at aid sites will help the country weather growing criticism. On the contrary, its growing estrangement from international partners and allies reveals the solipsism at the heart of this strategy. Israel’s overreliance on the US for support – such as Wednesday’s veto by America of a UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire and full aid access in Gaza – is not cast-iron. A much more transactional US administration is in the White House now.
The real way to deal with this criticism is to finally perceive the reality of this mess and enable international access to Gaza while maintaining a ceasefire. Instead of amassing myriad legal, political, diplomatic and security problems for the future, as well as a collection of broken relationships with erstwhile partners, a truly strategic Israeli government would let the UN and other professionals do their job.
The alternative is yet more suffering, guaranteeing that the Palestinian resistance narrative lasts much longer than this current phase of the conflict. On Wednesday, President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed and Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah El Sisi issued a renewed call for a permanent ceasefire during high-level talks in Abu Dhabi, as well as a "just and comprehensive peace" based on a two-state solution. All the deflection in the world cannot refute the hard logic of that position.
